Dumb questions about going from PC to Mac

Factual Questions
1

Long story short, my current laptop has finally done itself in. The screen no longer has any brightness (I’m typing this squinting with a lamp shining directly on the screen, and can barely see). Replacing it would cost nearly $400. New computer it is, then.

I’m considering getting a MacBook. They’re expensive, but so very pretty, and I’ve had to reinstall Windows three times in two years, so my patience has worn thin.

Hoow easy is it to make the switch? I have all my files backed up on an external drive, but I know there will be compatibility issues. Are .txt files compatible? How about MP3s? I understand that BootCamp is now a standard part of Leapord - would my existing XP cd work with that so I wouldn’t have to worry so much about compatability? What are the common issues when going from PC to Mac?

2

All your standard file formats are fully compatible. Text, music, video - it all works.

I don’t know if your old copy of Windows would install under Bootcamp or not. Sorry. Microsoft is so anal about running a registered copy of everything. Bootcamp will run Windows of course, I just don’t know if you’ll end up having to buy & register a new copy.

The commonest problem switching is just getting used to a new interface. You instinctively reach for the upper right-hand corner of your window to close, minimize, etc, Mac users instinctively reach for the upper left. You may be used to right clicking on things to get options, Mac users would control+click, or click & hold to get options (although you can buy a PC-style mouse if you want). Those are pretty minor interface differences, but they’re deal-breakers for some Windows users. I don’t know why. Most Mac users can jump onto a Windows machine and figure things out pretty quick, but some Windows users seem to get brain lock.

If you do buy a Mac there’s lots of Apple software built in to help you transition. They know some of their new users are Windows users, and anticipate lots of your questions.

3

If you have a generic version of Windows, (either retail boxed edition or an “OEM” version) it should work fine on the Mac. You may need to call Microsoft at the time of installation to let them know the old PC is dead and it’s being installed on new hardware. A “recovery” CD that came with a PC will not work as it’s custom-tweaked and irreversibly assigned to that particular brand and model of PC.

TXT files are as universal as you could ever hope for. MP3 files will be happily managed by iTunes. If you’ve got Microsoft Office files (Word docs, Excel sheets, etc) there is Office for Mac, or you can install your existing Office through BootCamp.

As levdrakon said, Apple knows they get a lot of converts from Windows, so they make a lot of the work of moving things over pretty simple. In reality, moving from my Windows XP computer to a Mac was not much more challenging than moving from a Windows NT computer to Windows XP. No matter what you’re moving from and to, there’s always a pile of settings that will not come across automatically, and there’s always a directory somewhere that you’ll forget about.

Forgot to say - even though the Mac comes with BootCamp to let you run Windows on the Mac, give OS X a chance. I’ve got Windows on this Mac with Parallels, but that’s only because I use one application that has no Mac equivalent. Most people really don’t need to install Windows on a Mac, and you’re better off without it - you will go batty trying to keep track of whether you’re in a Windows window or in an OS X window and you’ll invariable go grabbing the wrong corner to re-size, or look for buttons in the wrong place.

4

Once you make the switch, you are legally bound to stop having sex fantasies about John Hodgman and begin having sex fantasies about Justin Long.

5

I have one of each. The Mac is used primarily for graphics work (it came with Photoshop installed) and for some desktop publishing. It does both very well. What it doesn’t do is games and it is not user friendly on the internet, many websites I visit don’t come out right. The Mac also has a much nicer program for cataloging and listening to MP3’s but the sound card sucks and I haven’t found an upgrade to match the Creative sound card and Bose speakers I use with my PC. I have had some network issues with the Mac too. Just for the convenience of having a lot more hardware and software available, I will stick with a PC. In the 18 or so years I have owned Windows based computers, I have never had to do a reinstall, I have never understood why someone would have to do this.

6

Definitely, positively get a nice optical mouse with a right-click button. There’s not a single part of the MacOS, or any app that it can run, that doesn’t instantly recognize and respond properly to the right-click. I am a Mac person who has never owned a PC and I’ve probably spent no more than 60 hours grand total using a PC, but right-click is one nice thing the PC side came up with that the Mac has begrudgingly copied.

BootCamp: do you have an XP SP2 (or Vista, of course) installer? Nothing pre-SP2 will work. Although you can “slipstream” a homemade XP installer if you don’t have SP2 on CD.

Text files: Once upon a time in a long-ago era, it was an issue that Mac plain-text files used only a carriage return to mark end-of-line. Either Windows used carriage return + line feed and Unix used only line feed, or vice versa, I don’t recall which. It hasn’t been an issue in so long that I’m thinking either the OS itself or all modern apps that have anything to do with text files just adjust for end-of-line codes on the fly. I could be wrong. If you want to post a plain-text file (with hard returns of course) from Windows somewhere that I can download it, I will report back to you on whether or not it’s still an issue. It’s a fixable one even if it is an issue, btw: free Mac software such as TextWrangler will replace line feeds with carriage returns, and do 'em in batches if it comes to that. I really don’t think it’s an issue though.

MP3: common file format, no issues.
== Stuff you didn’t ask ==

Video formats. Got a lot of .avi or .wmv files, perhaps a few .flv files from YouTube, an .mpg or two, some .mov files as well, maybe? The MacOS does not ship with a comprehensive supply of video codecs and format-handlers. A great many are free and once installed will let you play your video files, but initially you may find it a hassle to chase them down, download them, and install them.

Access database files?: There ain’t no Access for MacOS. You can get a partial rescue from the Base module in OpenOffice or NeoOffice (the former being an X11 app, the latter being a Java version of same). But any vBasic-powered stuff that may have been written into your Access file will not perform under OpenOffice/NeoOffice. Mac users use FileMaker Pro. If you do database you’ll have to learn it. (It’s nice, but it’s not an Access clone. You’ll have to start over)

Windows don’t maximize in the MS-Windows sense of the word. They just zoom to a size sufficient to handle window contents. For some reason this seems to drive lots of former Windows users nuts at first. Mac apps don’t have an “application window” behind the document window, so not-maximized means being able to see other apps’ windows and switch to them by clicking on their windows.

Also because Mac apps don’t have application windows, closing the last close button you see onscreen doesn’t quit the app. That’s not a problem. You can have 40 or 60 apps running concurrently and it won’t hurt a thing if they don’t have processes going on; they won’t request processor cycles if you’ve closed all their windows, and their RAM will get paged out. But again it bothers some Windows switchers.

Single-clicking an icon and hitting return doesn’t launch or open the document or app. MacOS thinks you want to rename the file when you do that. If you want to launch/open it, either double-click it or single-click it and ⌘-down-arrow it to launch/open.

BootCamping: MacOS doesn’t natively let you write to NTFS disks (although it can deal with them read-only), and XP & Vista don’t comprehend HFS+ (the MacOS native disk format). If you want your Windows apps to have access to files stored in Mac-land, shell out for MacDrive. On the Mac side, install the free MacFUSE file system architecture (a user-space file system protocol) + the associated NTFS-3G which gives you full read-write support for NTFS disks. I know you can do FAT-32 for your Windows environment, but Windows really prefers NTFS, doesn’t it?

Parallels: Strongly consider Parallels even though it is not free. Instead of having a choice between Windows OR MacOS, run both at the same time. Also run Windows98 and Ubuntu and any other PC OS. My GF is totally a Windows-only person. She’s using a Mac Mini, never sees the MacOS at all, runs her entire Sony VAIO ported environment (Parallels lets you make a virtual machine of your existing Windows box, way cool) full-screen and forgets it’s just a virtual environment. You can also integrate them (right-click a file in Windows and you have the option of opening it in an appropriate Mac app, and vice versa; or hide Windows’ Desktop and just keep the Start Menu and your individual Windows document windows and they get treated like Mac apps’ windows.

7

I’m stuck using Windows at work, and of course Macs at home. It’s no big deal to go back and forth. I instinctively reach for the right spot based on the operating system. That goes for window resizing, too (on the Mac, there’s a single corner for resizing windows).

Like I said above, you will get used to it and automatically react once you’ve been exposed long enough. I’ve got 20 years of muscle memory built up, but honestly, it shouldn’t take that long. If you do use Parallels and enable Coherence mode, though, then maybe that battiness will happen. Coherence lets Windows windows mix with Mac windows, without showing the Windows desktop, kind of like Classic did in the old days. I can’t stand Coherence (and hated Classic for the same reasons) because of all the mixed methods of interaction. But when running a real PC (or BootCamp, I guess), or full screen, or even all my Windows windows in a single VM Window, then it’s all perfectly perfect for me.

What browser’s on that sucker? It ought to run FireFox. There aren’t too many sites that don’t play well with FireFox nowadays. On the other hand, if you need some very specific sites that don’t work with FireFox, then that would be a bummer (I’m looking at you, expense-report-program-at-work).

You can get iTunes for your PC, too.

It’s nice being able to get onto an NT domain and not having stupid GPO’s tell me what I can or can’t do on my own computer! Really, though, probably running an older OS, right?

Because we all need the choice of 1000 text editors instead of 50. :slight_smile: I’m not trying to give you a hard time, really. FWIW, most of the hardward is commodity hardware these days.

Wow! In the 15 years that I’ve owned Windows computers, re-installs have been a frequent thing. It’s mitigated now by just having a virgin VM image as a backup, though. If you never install and uninstall anything or update software, I guess it’s conceivable you’ll never have to reinstall the Windows operating system. A reinstall is the only way to start from a clean slate. Generally speaking, it’s much easier on the Mac, although I’ll admit that any time I upgrade major versions (recently from 10.4 to 10.5), I do a format and clean install, just to be safe.

That’s interesting. The universal shortcut for opening things has always been ⌘-O, you know, for Open. I think the down-arrow came along when disclosure triangles were added to Finder. We needed something to open folder contents without opening a new window.
NinjaChick, what are the specific apps you depend on now on Windows?

8

I’d have to agree with this. I’ve used Macs since about '90, but a two-button mouse with scroll wheel feels very intuitive. I don’t like using PCs for many reasons, but their mice aren’t one of them. The thing I don’t like with the Windows two button system is right clicking something, then choosing, then having to click “yes” I really did want to do what I just chose to do. Windows seems to add a “did you really want to do that?” step to everything you do.